The (re)write stuff

Enter Tang. Yes, the “delicious breakfast drink” that was marketed to kids (like us) as the very same orange glunk that American astronauts drank on the Moon.

So advertising ties were needed to warm the public up to Apollo 11, including cars and Omega watches (though Cole draws the line at astronaut-endorsed Fruit of the Looms).

Cole encounters Kelly at a meet-cute Florida diner near the NASA launch site, and he’s smitten at first sight; the snappy repartee comes a bit later, when Cole learns that Kelly will cheerily go around his directive not to interview NASA astronauts and engineers by simply hiring actors to play them instead.

In turning the Moon Race into a screwball space comedy, Fly Me to the Moon benefits from its appealing leads, its light tone and a nostalgic gaze back not just at American history, but at a positivity and inspiration that seems to be in short supply nowadays. In this, the rom-com works along a somewhat parallel track with Philip Kaufman’s 1983 space-race drama, The Right Stuff, which highlighted the pioneer astronauts’ undaunted American spirit and inventiveness. It, too, focused on the need to project a media-friendly image in launching its straight-from-central-casting astronauts, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins, before the cameras. For NASA, public appearance was all.

Johansson is charming here, not least in her period ’dos and figure-hugging ‘60s attire. She, like Cole, harbors Big Hidden Secrets in her past, which it takes about 90 minutes to fully explore and unravel. But getting there, with all the constant flirty barbs, is well worth the trip. (Also fun to watch: Jim Rash as a diva film director hired by Kelly, Ray Romano as a grizzled older NASA chief engineer, Woody Harrelson as a shady government man, and even ScarJo’s hubby, Colin Jost, popping up as an easily-duped senator.) As a NASA guy who fears the worst that can happen, Tatum brings a whole square-jawed American anxiety to the enterprise: he’s not comfortable with the media circus, but he’s spot-on honest about how much the spiritual quest of space actually inspires him.

The film benefits from this yin-yang combo. As director Berlanti puts it, “It took two kinds of people to go the to moon—it took the hardworking, everyday people who were pouring their hearts and souls into the mechanics of it, and it took the hype men like JFK to sell it, before anybody knew it was possible. And that’s the spirit of America: it takes the salesman and the individuals who pull it off.”

As Cole and Kelly start to align in their enthusiasm for launch day (and smooch a little), the public starts to cheer them on.

So naturally, the film needs a midpoint monkey wrench. Thus the second act revolves around a deeper conspiracy, one that tinfoil-hat types have bandied about since the early ‘70s: that America never actually landed astronauts on the Moon in 1969, it was all a hoax filmed on a soundstage. (Some even insist that Stanley Kubrick—who had just made the seamless 2001: Space Odyssey—shot the fake footage. Absurd, considering it took the finicky director up to five years to complete a film, and NASA was under serious time constraints.)

It’s kind of funny that a light comedy that parallels Kelly’s cheery white lies with good old American pluck would then wander down a darker rabbit hole with Harrelson’s government man Moe in cahoots with agencies that not even Edgar Hoover knows about. If true, this would be fakery on a global scale. But Fly Me to the Moon manages to brush off the whole “let’s fake the Moon landing” thing with a bit of charm and sleight of hand. Even Kelly’s knack for rewriting reality and fudging facts doesn’t detract from the film’s true mission: summer entertainment.

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Fly Me to the Moon from Columbia Pictures is now showing.